President Vladimir Putin has ordered reinforcements to battle the out-of-control currently wildfires raging across Russia’s largest and coldest region, the Kremlin said Tuesday. Authorities in the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) announced a state of emergency Sunday as the annual fires that have torn through the Siberian region’s boreal forests reached human settlements, destroying dozens of…
Russia has barred entry to ‘anti-Russian’ British officials in retaliation to human rights and anti-corruption sanctions from London, Moscow announced Monday. Britain in December banned entry to three Russians accused of torturing LGBT people in Chechnya and later to 14 Russians in April as part of global Magnitsky sanctions. “We consider London’s unjustified attacks to be a…
Reactor vessel and four steam generators for Unit 2 of Rooppur NPP that is under construction (general contractor – JSC ASE, ROSATOM Engineering Division), have been delivered to Bangladesh. Heavy equipment of the reactor compartment of Unit 2 (the weight of the reactor vessel is 333.6 tons, the weight of steam generator is 340 tons)…
Russia and China have kicked off joint military exercises as the two countries seek to deepen cooperation amid regional security concerns and deteriorating ties with the United States, the Russian Defense Ministry announced Monday. More than 10,000 troops are taking part in the five-day Zapad/Interaction 2021 drills in northwestern China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region. According…
Russia has confirmed 6,491,288 cases of coronavirus and 166,442 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 531,000. August 10: What you need to know today Russia on Tuesday reported 21,378 new coronavirus cases and 792 deaths. Russia saw more than 530,000 excess deaths between the start…
Nine coronavirus patients died Monday in Russia’s republic of North Ossetia after an oxygen pipe ruptured at a hospital in the capital Vladikavkaz, authorities said. “Nine patients with coronavirus died due to the lack of oxygen at the Republic Clinical Hospital of Vladikavkaz,” Russian news agencies cited the ministry as saying. They also quoted the…
Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko on Monday denounced Western sanctions as Washington and London levied new penalties against his authoritarian regime that has sought to snuff out all dissent in the ex-Soviet country a year after historic protests. In power since 1994, the moustachioed strongman has waged a brutal crackdown since mass demonstrations erupted after elections…
Russia can expect to see intensifying wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events in the coming decades as the global climate crisis deepens a decade sooner than projected just three years ago, UN climate experts said in a bombshell report published Monday. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows unequivocally that global warming…
A Moscow court has jailed a popular standup comic for inciting hatred in a joke it ruled to be denigrating to ethnic Russians, media reported Monday. Idrak Mirzalizade, who is Azerbaijani but holds a Belarusian passport, made the offending joke on a popular YouTube show this spring, where he told a story about non-Slavs facing discrimination…
If you typically tend to skip introductory notes at exhibitions, you may want to make an exception for New Nature, a new project on display at the Manege Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg. The works by the Recycle Group — artists Andrei Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov — in New Nature focus on Homo Virtualis, a…
Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko denied on Monday that his authoritarian government was using torture and violence to silence all dissent, a year after he sparked massive protests by claiming to have won a disputed election. He also denied his country had any involvement in the death of an activist in Ukraine or in trying to…
None of the dozens of businesses working on the shores of the world’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal, meet current environmental standards, the head of Russia’s state environmental watchdog said Monday. UNESCO added Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and oldest lake, to its list of World Heritage Sites on the condition that Russian law grants…
A Russian tourist flight from Moscow landed in an Egyptian Red Sea resort Monday for the first time since the October 2015 jihadist bombing of a Russian airliner, a civil aviation official said. Moscow barred direct flights to Egypt after the bombing of the passenger plane shortly after it took off from the popular Red…
Russia’s Olympic athletes may have been competing in Tokyo under the title and banner of the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) over state-sponsored doping revelations — but they nonetheless brought home the highest number of medals for their country since the 2004 Athens Olympics. The ROC team came in fifth place overall, with 20 gold medals,…
The Russian nuclear regulator, the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor), has granted a license to Rusatom Overseas JSC allowing the company to build nuclear installations at nuclear power plants. The license was obtained within the framework of the land-based small modular reactor plant (SMR NPP) construction project with a RITM-200N reactor…
Sergei Kovalev, one of the most significant political and human rights figures of the Soviet Union and Russia, died Monday. He was 91 years old. Sergei Kovalev was born in a small town in the Ukrainian SSR in 1930 and moved with his parents to a village not far from Moscow in 1932. He graduated…
Russian media have reported that Lyubov Sobol, a key ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, has fled Russia, reports that the lawyer and activist has not confirmed herself. Sobol was last week sentenced to 1.5 years of “restricted freedom” after being found guilty of inciting violations of coronavirus rules by calling for pro-Navalny rallies…
Smoke from wildfires burning across Russia’s largest and coldest region has reached the North Pole for what is believed to be the first time in known history last week, according to satellite observations. The European Union’s Copernicus satellite monitoring service has said that the forest fires in the Siberian republic of Sakha (Yakutia) — fueled…
Russia has confirmed 6,447,750 cases of coronavirus and 164,881 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 531,000. August 8: What you need to know today Russia on Saturday reported 22,866 new coronavirus cases and 793 deaths. Russia saw more than 530,000 excess deaths between the start of…
A Chechen man was handed a life sentence in Austria on Friday after being convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident, a court spokesman said. Mamikhan Umarov, 43, who was granted political asylum in Austria in 2005 and known locally as Martin Beck, was found dead with gunshot wounds near Vienna on July 4 last year.…
And just like that, it’s August, a month when almost anything can happen, and in Russia usually does. Each year the country braces itself for “The August Curse,” the month’s propensity towards natural disasters from hurricanes to floods, and even peat bog fires, combined with a tragic number of air and rail crashes and the…
Russia isn’t competing in the 2020 Olympic Games — at least formally, that is. Due to doping violations the team is competing as the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC). Athletes compete under a neutral flag and the phrase “neutral athlete” must be on their uniforms. They are forbidden from including national symbols, including the national emblem,…
American investor Michael Calvey has been handed a five-and-a-half year suspended sentence after being found guilty of embezzlement in a highly controversial case that has rocked Russia’s business world. The star American investor was first detained in February 2019 on charges related to loans issued by a bank owned by his Baring Vostok fund in…
Russia has recorded more than half a million excess deaths since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, official figures published Friday show. Nationwide fatalities surged during June — the latest month for which such data is available — as the Delta variant of the coronavirus tore across the capital Moscow and spread out into the…
Verkhnechonskneftegaz, an enterprise of Rosneft Oil Company, has increased its field pipeline accident-free performance by 50% in 2020.
This summer the AZ Museum, a private museum dedicated to the works of Anatoly Zverev and non-conformist Soviet artists, has been celebrating the art of portraiture. The three-story townhouse museum has on display 70 works by “unofficial” Soviet and contemporary artists, that is, artists who did not work according to the conventions of socialist realism…
Nargiz With most theaters on tour or closed for the month, a lot of Moscow’s entertainment has migrated outdoors. On Saturday night the Green Theater at VDNKh Park is welcoming Nargiz, a singer from Uzbekistan with a spectacular voice and modern folkloric style. Born to a musical family in Tashkent, Nargiz won many singing awards…
Jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s brother and close ally have been sentenced over their roles in this winter’s mass protests calling for his release, his ally said Friday. Oleg Navalny and Nikolai Lyaskin were among several prominent opposition figures to be charged with violating coronavirus restrictions on mass events by calling on supporters to take…
Q2 and 1H 2021 IFRS financial results and corresponding MD&A will be available on our website on Friday, August 13, 2021 at 10:00 Moscow time
When Olga Misik splashed red paint on the guard’s booth outside the federal prosecutor’s office in Moscow last summer, she didn’t think the minor political act would turn into a criminal offense. “Two days before I acted I did my research and understood that this wouldn’t even be classified as an administrative offense,” Misik, who…
Russia has confirmed 6,402,564 cases of coronavirus and 163,301 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 483,000. August 4: What you need to know today Russia on Friday reported 22,660 new coronavirus cases and 792 deaths. The European Union now recognizes vaccination certificates from San Marino, where…
The Belarusian Olympic Committee on Friday vowed to protect its members from “discrimination” after two Belarus coaches were stripped of Olympic passes over their alleged attempt to force an athlete to return home. The pair were probed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) over their role in the case of Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, 24, who criticized…
Two Belarusian coaches have been stripped of their Tokyo Olympics accreditations over an alleged attempt to force a sprinter to fly home, an incident that drew international condemnation. The International Olympic Committee on Friday said it had removed the accreditations of Artur Shimak and Yury Maisevich and they had left the Olympic Village. The body…
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is investigating two Russian state-run TV channels over talk shows that disparaged the lifestyles of a transgender and a gay athlete as “perversion” and “abomination,” the BBC has reported. Two of Russia’s most popular channels, Rossiya and Channel One, dedicated several of their late-July talk shows to transgender New Zealand…
The Russian military’s chief of staff arrived in Central Asia Thursday as Russia held military drills in two ex-Soviet countries bordering Afghanistan where Kabul is struggling to contain a ferocious Taliban offensive. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military’s General Staff flew into Uzbekistan — Central Asia’s most populous country — to observe joint Russian-Uzbek military…
Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya said she was “happy to be in safety” in Warsaw on Thursday, a day after arriving in Poland where she took refuge after saying she feared for her life if forced to return home. The 24-year-old athlete has been at the center of a diplomatic drama in the middle of…
As part of the visit to the Russian Federation of a high-ranking delegation from Bangladesh, including representatives of the Ministry of Science and Technology, members of the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC), managers of the Rooppur NPP and representatives of the Bangladesh Embassy, visited Rosatom Technical Academy. The delegation was led by Minister of Science…
Moscow is ready to issue visas to new U.S. Embassy employees, a senior Russian diplomat said Thursday, after the Russian ambassador in Washington decried tight visa-issuing procedures for Russian employees. Alexander Bikantov, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy spokesman, said Russia is “open for dialogue” despite what he described as Washington’s “unconstructive approach.” “We’re ready to take…
A Moscow court has found American investor Michael Calvey guilty of embezzlement in a case which has rocked the Russian corporate world. The capital’s Meshchansky district court ruled Thursday that Calvey and his business partners had engaged in “criminal embezzlement,” agreeing with the prosecution’s argument that he had “organized and issued deliberately bad loans” to…
Just a few weeks before the UN’s COP26 climate change conference, the Russian Government has asked several ministries to figure out how Russia can catch up with other developed nations on the path to decarbonization, the RBC news website has reported. Russia is one of the few leading economies not to have submitted a more…
Support for erecting a monument to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has nearly doubled in the past decade, a survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency said Wednesday. According to the results, 48% of Russians said they support a Stalin statue and 20% are against the idea. This marks a turnaround from 2010, when 25%…
Russia has confirmed 6,379,904 cases of coronavirus and 162,509 deaths, according to the national coronavirus information center. Russia’s total excess fatality count since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is around 483,000. August 4: What you need to know today Russia on Thursday reported 23,120 new coronavirus cases and 794 deaths. The European Union now recognizes vaccination certificates from San Marino, where…
Alexander Fyodorov peered out his office window towards the vast forests where wildfires had been raging for weeks around the Siberian city of Yakutsk. It was a rare day for this summer — for once the sky in the world’s coldest city was not shrouded in a sepia orange toxic smog, produced by the third…
Russian authorities have blocked access to exiled former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s rights group website and news outlets, which have been critical of the Kremlin ahead of next month’s high-stakes elections. Open Media and MBKh Media said late Wednesday that they had not been notified of the intention to block their websites by state media watchdog…
Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya landed in Poland on Wednesday, where she is to take refuge after saying she feared for her life if forced to return home. The 24-year-old sprinter has been at the center of a diplomatic drama in the middle of the Games since seeking the protection of Tokyo 2020 staff on…
The makers of the Russian Covid-19 vaccine Sputnik V on Wednesday promised to resolve delivery delays this month after several South American countries complained to Russia. The delays occured due to a “production scale up” and will be “fully resolved” in August, Russia’s Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) that financially backs Sputnik V, said in a…
International monitors said Wednesday they would not send observers to Russia for next month’s general election because of a limit on numbers imposed by Russian authorities. “We very much regret that our observation of the forthcoming elections in Russia will not be possible,” said Matteo Mecacci, director of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and…
Russian opposition figure Lyubov Sobol doesn’t intend to quit politics despite a court-appointed curfew and a ban on running for parliament, she told The Moscow Times on Wednesday. The ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 1.5 years of restricted freedom Tuesday over her role in organizing Moscow’s pro-Navalny protest on Jan.…
The month of August means one thing in Russia: Vacation. Despite a third wave of the coronavirus fueled by the contagious Delta varian, Russians have been making their annual trips to bathe and relax in the sunshine. Here’s a look at some of the many ways Russians spend their summer holidays:
Russia’s forest fires spread by a record margin on Monday, making the current wildfire season the country’s third-largest this century as smoke from the blazes wafts over huge expanses of Siberia, experts from Greenpeace Russia reported. The fires grew by 0.6 million hectares — 98% of which were located in the far northeastern republic of…
Belarusian Olympic athlete Krystsina Tsimanouskaya arrived in Austria on Wednesday en route to Poland, where she is expected to take refuge after saying she feared for her life if forced to return home. The 24-year-old sprinter has been at the center of a diplomatic drama in the middle of the Games since seeking protection from…
Engineers will need to determine if a Russian module briefly throwing the International Space Station out of position had long-term effects on the other systems in the ISS, the Associated Press quoted a Russian space official as saying Wednesday. The Nauka laboratory module’s thrusters fired unexpectedly a few hours after docking Thursday, causing the ISS…
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday ordered an investigation into the death of an Iraqi man who was allegedly found near Belarus’s border with Lithuania as tensions flare between the two countries. The announcement of the probe came as border guards in EU member Lithuania said Tuesday they had begun to push back migrants trying…
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who is convicted of espionage in Russia, has not been in touch with his family for more than a month, one of his lawyers said Tuesday. A Moscow court last year found Whelan guilty of receiving classified information at an upscale hotel in 2018 and sentenced him to 16 years in…
Russia exported more than $300 million worth of vaccines in the first five months of the year, customs data shows — more than the entire value of vaccines sold in the previous three years combined. The increase was driven by foreign sales of Russia’s flagship Sputnik V anti-coronavirus vaccine, with millions of doses shipped overseas…
Maria Kolesnikova, the last remaining protest leader still in Belarus, went on trial on Wednesday after 10 months in custody as the regime of Alexander Lukashenko seeks to crush all dissent. In power since 1994, Lukashenko has been cracking down on opponents since unprecedented protests erupted after last year’s elections, deemed unfair by the West.…
Russian nationals are among the thousands of migrants illegally crossing the border from Belarus to Lithuania, a senior diplomat from the EU member state told Russian media Tuesday. Lithuanian officials say they suspect the migrant crisis is being orchestrated by the regime of Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko in retaliation to EU sanctions over his crackdown on political opponents.…
At the trendy Khlebozavod and Flacon design factories — former industrial spaces turned into shops, galleries and cafes — it seems like everyone’s hair is rainbow-colored. Young men and women have hair that ranges in color tone from pale to neon: mint, lilac, blue, purple, various shades of pink. Some have all their hair dyed,…
August 4, 2021, 12:20 Photos State registration of amendments to the Articles of Association of Gazprom has been completed. The amendments include the change of the parent company’s location to St. Petersburg. Interdistrict Inspectorate of the Federal Tax Service No. 15 for St. Petersburg has accordingly changed the information on Gazprom’s address in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. The new location of Gazprom is St. Petersburg. The new address of the…
Iran, Ghana and other African and Latin American countries are some of the places hit hardest by delays in the delivery of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, the BBC has reported. The Islamic republic, battling a fifth wave of the Delta variant-driven outbreak, has received around 2 million doses out of the 60 million it…